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Rare hard lock ups with videos with acceleration with an old ATIRadeon 4870 HD video card in a Windows XP Pro. SP3 machine?

Rare hard lock ups with videos with acceleration with an old ATIRadeon 4870 HD video card in a Windows XP Pro. SP3 machine?

Hi!

I am having annoying, rare hard computer lock ups when it comes to
playing videos through local files (MPEG-2 and TS) with various players
(Media Player Classic-Home Cinema, DVB Viewer Pro, and VideoLAN Client
(VLC) Media Player) and streaming Mozilla SeaMonkey v2.0.14 web
browser's Flash. It's not easy to reproduce the hard crash easily since
it is rare and random. I don't need to be using the computer with the
videos playing to reproduce the hard lock ups too. It has been happening
for over a year or so on this old, updated Windows XP Pro. SP3 machine
with a MSI R4870-T2D512 OC Radeon HD (512 MB) PCIe video card from late
2008. More details can be found in http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt for the primary computer.

I tried upgrading with its various drivers and softwares, but nothing
seems to improve and fix this problem. The only thing that seems to fix
it is disabling video acceleration fully (none) in Windows XP Pro. I
have not seen the hard lock ups for about a month of testings with no
video accerelation. SP3's display properties' troubleshoot tab (no
reboot required). However, this makes display stuff slower and choppier,
unable to use ATI/AMD's CCC, upside down videos for some formats (e.g.,
MPEG-2 and TS), etc. DPC Latency Checker v1.3.0 showed about 1000-2000us
with acceleration for videos. Without acceleration, it is under 250us.
Big differences and maybe the cause?

I really don't want to reinstall Windows from scratch/cleanly to fix
this too. I am hoping someone would have some ideas to try. Maybe the
video card is dying due to its old age? I also don't play computer games
anymore for years, so I don't know if they will crash too. I assume they
will if a 3D screen saver had a hard lock up before.

Thank you in advance.
--
"The ant has made himself illustrious; Through constant industry
industrious.; So what? Would you be calm and placid; If you were full of
formic acid?" --Ogden Nash (The Ant)
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.ma.cx (Personal Web Site)
/ /\ /\ \ Ant's Quality Foraged Links: http://aqfl.net
| |o o| |
\ _ / If crediting, then use Ant nickname and AQFL URL/link.
( ) If e-mailing, then axe ANT from its address if needed.
Ant is currently not listening to any songs on this computer.

I am having annoying, rare hard computer lock ups when it comes
to playing videos through local files (MPEG-2 and TS) with
various players (Media Player Classic-Home Cinema, DVB Viewer
Pro, and VideoLAN Client (VLC) Media Player) and streaming
Mozilla SeaMonkey v2.0.14 web browser's Flash. It's not easy to
reproduce the hard crash easily since it is rare and random. I
don't need to be using the computer with the videos playing to
reproduce the hard lock ups too. It has been happening for over a
year or so on this old, updated Windows XP Pro. SP3 machine with
a MSI R4870-T2D512 OC Radeon HD (512 MB) PCIe video card from
late 2008. More details can be found inhttp://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt for the
primary computer.

I tried upgrading with its various drivers and softwares, but
nothing seems to improve and fix this problem. The only thing
that seems to fix it is disabling video acceleration fully (none)
in Windows XP Pro. I have not seen the hard lock ups for about a
month of testings with no video accerelation. SP3's display
properties' troubleshoot tab (no reboot required). However, this
makes display stuff slower and choppier, unable to use ATI/AMD's
CCC, upside down videos for some formats (e.g., MPEG-2 and TS),
etc. DPC Latency Checker v1.3.0 showed about 1000-2000us with
acceleration for videos. Without acceleration, it is under 250us.
Big differences and maybe the cause?

I really don't want to reinstall Windows from scratch/cleanly to
fix this too. I am hoping someone would have some ideas to try.
Maybe the video card is dying due to its old age? I also don't
play computer games anymore for years, so I don't know if they
will crash too. I assume they will if a 3D screen saver had a
hard lock up before.

Thank you in advance.

The recommended solution for MS Windows problems is Linux.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu would probably be the best choice for someone
mostly happy with Winblows.

Cheers!

jim b.

--
UNIX is not user unfriendly; it merely
expects users to be computer-friendly.

Thank you in advance.
--
"The ant has made himself illustrious; Through constant industry
industrious.; So what? Would you be calm and placid; If you were full of
formic acid?" --Ogden Nash (The Ant)
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.ma.cx (Personal Web Site)
/ /\ /\ \ Ant's Quality Foraged Links: http://aqfl.net
| |o o| |
\ _ / If crediting, then use Ant nickname and AQFL URL/link.
( ) If e-mailing, then axe ANT from its address if needed.
Ant is currently not listening to any songs on this computer.

Rare hard lock ups with videos with acceleration with an old ATIRadeon 4870 HD video card in a Windows XP Pro. SP3 machine?

It could be a resource problem. How much ram do you have? you might have
a rootkit trojan thats messing up your resources. Try downloading and
runnig TDSSKILLER Anti-rootkit utilityhttp://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208283363 it's free from
Kaspersky. You could also check your processes in you task manager and
disable unnecessary processes to free up some ram. You can disable them
in your control panel or by running msconfig. I've been using windows 7
64bit for quite awhile now but I seem to remember that xp 32bit can't
use more than 3 gig's of ram. http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm So
you might have to disable some unnecessary programs or find out what's
causing a conflict by disabling programs by trial and error. Certain
antivirus programs are ram hungry norton and avg use alot of ram. If all
else fails I would upgrade to windows 7 if your system can handle it.
You won't lose your files and programs as long as you don't do a clean
install. I've heard alot of windows 7bashing on this forum by people who
don't know it but Ive been using it for over a year now and it's way
better than xp

Interesting. I have had this Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650 watts ATX12V/EPS12V
SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC power supply
since end of 2010 when it was new. Also, why would having video
acceleration cause these rare lock ups when having none doesn't?

On 3/29/2012 4:08 PM PT, Stephen H. Fischer typed:
Hi,

I have seen posts on AVS by a resident HTPC expert suggesting a flakily
power supply may be the cause of the problems like you are seeing.
(11,544 posts and not a moderator.)

Perhaps more heat generated due to more intense processing
activity? Or the extra current draw exceeding the power supply's
ability to consistently provide?

But a 650-watt power supply really should not have such problems.
Of course, it is possible for the voltage/current on a specific
set of rails to be out of spec while the rest of the thing is
fine. A bad connection could do that. But I would not fool
around with a power supply unless I knew exactly what I was
doing, even with the thing disconnected from the mains.

Puzzling.

jim b.

On 03/30/2012 02:28 AM, Ant wrote:
Interesting. I have had this Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650 watts
ATX12V/EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active
PFC power supply since end of 2010 when it was new. Also, why
would having video acceleration cause these rare lock ups when
having none doesn't?

On 3/29/2012 4:08 PM PT, Stephen H. Fischer typed:
Hi,

I have seen posts on AVS by a resident HTPC expert suggesting a
flakily
power supply may be the cause of the problems like you are seeing.
(11,544 posts and not a moderator.)

Yeah, I don't think it would be a power issue. I wished there was a
bootable disc or USB flash media to test this issue out with full video
acceleration with videos.

On 3/30/2012 5:30 AM PT, Jim Beard typed:
Perhaps more heat generated due to more intense processing activity? Or
the extra current draw exceeding the power supply's ability to
consistently provide?

But a 650-watt power supply really should not have such problems.
Of course, it is possible for the voltage/current on a specific set of
rails to be out of spec while the rest of the thing is fine. A bad
connection could do that. But I would not fool around with a power
supply unless I knew exactly what I was doing, even with the thing
disconnected from the mains.

Puzzling.

jim b.

On 03/30/2012 02:28 AM, Ant wrote:
Interesting. I have had this Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650 watts
ATX12V/EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active
PFC power supply since end of 2010 when it was new. Also, why
would having video acceleration cause these rare lock ups when
having none doesn't?

On 3/29/2012 4:08 PM PT, Stephen H. Fischer typed:
Hi,

I have seen posts on AVS by a resident HTPC expert suggesting a
flakily
power supply may be the cause of the problems like you are seeing.
(11,544 posts and not a moderator.)

Thank you in advance.
--
"Did the ant fall off the toilet seat because she was ****ed off?" --unknown
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.ma.cx (Personal Web Site)
/ /\ /\ \ Ant's Quality Foraged Links: http://aqfl.net
| |o o| |
\ _ / If crediting, then use Ant nickname and AQFL URL/link.
( ) If e-mailing, then axe ANT from its address if needed.
Ant is currently not listening to any songs on this computer.

I have 6 GB of RAM. I already scanned with the latest versions of and
updated MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware, SuperAntiSpyware, The Cleaner,
SpyBot S&D, and Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (mrt.exe's full
scan). I highly doubt it is those. Why would I have no hard lock up
problems with the video acceleration completely disabled?

FYI, uninstalling and clearing out left overs to downgrade back to v9.7
driver did not fix the problem. Currently with the latest v12.3 driver,
I am underclocking my GPU clock settings to 500 MHz and memory clock
settings to 500 Mhz through enabled AMD Overdrive to see if that fix it
since we know having video acceleration is making my PC lock up hard.
They are the lowest I can go.

Now, I noticed loading, unloading, and playing embedded Flash videos
show flickers with these low values. I don't mind them if it fixes my
lock ups! So far so good after five hours, but it it still too early...

On 3/29/2012 6:55 PM PT, yukonron typed:
It could be a resource problem. How much ram do you have? you might have
a rootkit trojan thats messing up your resources. Try downloading and
runnig TDSSKILLER Anti-rootkit utilityhttp://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208283363 it's free from
Kaspersky. You could also check your processes in you task manager and
disable unnecessary processes to free up some ram. You can disable them
in your control panel or by running msconfig. I've been using windows 7
64bit for quite awhile now but I seem to remember that xp 32bit can't
use more than 3 gig's of ram. http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm So
you might have to disable some unnecessary programs or find out what's
causing a conflict by disabling programs by trial and error. Certain
antivirus programs are ram hungry norton and avg use alot of ram. If all
else fails I would upgrade to windows 7 if your system can handle it.
You won't lose your files and programs as long as you don't do a clean
install. I've heard alot of windows 7bashing on this forum by people who
don't know it but Ive been using it for over a year now and it's way
better than xp

--
"Ants can lift up to 50 times their own weight. And your monitor is
missing. Time to bring out the bugspray." --BBspot's Geek Horoscopes
(2/28/2003)
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.ma.cx (Personal Web Site)
/ /\ /\ \ Ant's Quality Foraged Links: http://aqfl.net
| |o o| |
\ _ / If crediting, then use Ant nickname and AQFL URL/link.
( ) If e-mailing, then axe ANT from its address if needed.
Ant is currently not listening to any songs on this computer.